A motion-capture lab measures precisely and costs six figures; the clinician's eye is free and forgets. In between sits 2D video analysis on the device already in your pocket: film the squat, gait, or hop test, review it in slow motion, measure the joint angle on screen, and put today's movement next to the intake video. It doesn't replace clinical judgment — it gives it a record and a ruler.
What video adds to a movement assessment
- It slows down what happens too fast. Dynamic knee valgus on landing takes a tenth of a second — visible frame by frame, guessable at full speed.
- It's repeatable. The same test, filmed from the same position, week after week, becomes a comparable series.
- It convinces patients. Adherence improves when the patient can see the asymmetry at intake and see it shrinking. Feeling better is abstract; two videos side by side aren't.
- It documents. Objective-looking progress evidence for notes, referrers, and return-to-play conversations.
A simple clinical workflow
- Standardize the shot. Fixed camera position (tripod or shelf), fixed distance, perpendicular to the plane you're assessing — frontal for valgus/pelvic drop, sagittal for gait and squat depth. 2D angles are only comparable when the camera setup is.
- Film short and specific. Ten seconds of the actual test beats three minutes of setup. Standard candidates: overhead squat, single-leg squat, gait passes both directions, step-down, hop battery.
- Review with the patient in the room. In Coach Video Analysis: slow motion at 1/4 or 1/8 speed, frame-step to the deepest point or foot strike, pinch-zoom to the joint.
- Measure on screen. The angle tool takes three points — hip, knee, ankle — and shows degrees, with draggable points for fine placement. Horizontal and vertical reference lines check pelvic drop and trunk lean; the on-video stopwatch times single-leg stance or stair descent phases.
- Save the evidence. Clip the key repetition into the patient's record folder in Photos, or export the marked-up freeze-frames as a kinogram — the whole squat in five stills on one image.
Before/after: the therapy comparison
Load the intake video and today's video as a pair, choose side-by-side layout, align both on the same event (foot strike, start of descent), and tap Lock — both now play and frame-step in sync. Enable mirror drawing so the reference line you draw appears identically on both videos. Six weeks of rehab compressed into one synced comparison is the strongest motivation slide a clinic has — and shown large over AirPlay on the waiting-room TV, it's also the clearest.
Privacy: patient videos stay put
Cloud coaching platforms want accounts for every patient and upload footage to their servers — a data-protection conversation most clinics would rather not have. Coach Video Analysis requires no account, and videos are read from and saved to the device's own Photos library; processing happens on the device. Your existing device-management and storage policies keep applying, and nothing new touches a third-party cloud.
Clinical review in Coach Video Analysis
Slow motion to 1/16 speed, frame-by-frame stepping, three-point joint angles in degrees, reference lines, stopwatch, synced before/after comparison, kinogram export for documentation, and a free AI skeleton overlay — on the iPhone or iPad already in the clinic. Free to download.
